Forum:Genealogy now has a Bot- PhloxBot
Category:bots Like a little Roomba, he will be happy to take on some pretty tedious chores. Got about 3000 pages with spaces in the name, or ( abt 1865??-??) rather than (c1865)? Robin will make the call on what tasks have highest priority. While I am active here, I won't mind running it on tasks as agreed upon. The main page User:PhloxBot has pointers to the near term tasks as well as a Projects page where other possibilities have listed. -Phlox- (formerly Mak) 05:33, 7 September 2007 (UTC) :Perhaps making UNKNOWN (?-?) to Unknown (?-?) and delinking them so they look like this: Unknown (?-?). -AMK152(Talk • 02:49, 8 September 2007 (UTC) ::Well, maybe; I see that sort of "link" as a handy maintenance tool - http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Unknown_%28%3F-%3F%29 - showing which pages need attention (because it often results from people simply not adding names they actually knew); can you show us where to find the ones you mean? Robin Patterson 15:29, 8 September 2007 (UTC) :(Phlox is too kind. My only "claims" to authority here are that I've made more non-article edits than any other human active here and that I started here before any of the currently active contributors did.) Thanks for setting the bot up and publicising it! Robin Patterson 15:29, 8 September 2007 (UTC) ::I'd really like to emphasize how easy it is to run bots, and that this can be an egalitarian thing. They are wildly powerful, but heck- so is a car and we manage not to maim 100s of people every day when we drive them. The only tough part is initially getting it set up. That can be a little wierd, but if you know some geek lad that can follow some instructions, I'll put the info up on some suitably obscure location (can you imagine what spammers would do with a bot?) so that if you guys get the notion to run one yourselves, that you can have it. I'm not trying to be modest. I can't fathom why some bot writers want to make it seem like they wrote a 'bot'. The guys that wrote these scripts deserve the credit- Daniel Herding and Andre Engels in particular have led the pywikipedia collaborative effort in a stellar manner. :: Anyway, take for examplt the script that did the "List of surnames" change. Hardly even what you call a script. After all was installed you know what I did? I just pulled out a file that has one line in it, changed the "from" and "to" category names, then watch it do it's work. eg: C:\Python25\python.exe category.py move "-from:Lists of People by Surname" "-to:Surnames" :::That's it. ::I could type it in from the windows run menu item, or from a command line prompt. Anything goes floeey, you just hit cntl-c, or all else fails kill the window. ::Sure, there is a heck of a lot of fancy stuff you can do with it, but the authors have set it up to do a lot of the common wiki tasks that really only a bot doesn't mind doing. That's why the cat move happenned so fast. If you peruse the Pywikipedia resources, you will see some of these tasks enumerated. -Phlox- 16:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC) Now we have another bot Welcome to User:AMK152Bot. Now back to Genealogy:Bot policy and waiting for AMK to tell us where to list job requests for discussion. Robin Patterson 01:26, 22 July 2008 (UTC) :Job requests can be listed right on the User:AMK152Bot page. -AMK152(talk • ) 02:07, 22 July 2008 (UTC) ::*Use User talk:AMK152Bot instead. -AMK152(talk • ) 12:37, 22 July 2008 (UTC)